Member Highlight: Information Technology and Systems Center (ITSC) – at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH)

Information Technology and Systems Center (ITSC) – at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) and directed by Dr. Sara Graves. ITSC is a university research center specializing in basic and applied research in data science and information technology topics. The center collaborates with Earth science researchers to develop solutions enabling improved access, use, and analysis of scientific data. The scope of ITSC solutions range from large complex algorithms running on high performance computing systems, to mobile applications providing easier access to science data and information.

ITSC is located on the UAH campus in Huntsville, AL, in the 2nd largest university-supported research park in the U.S., adjacent to the Redstone Arsenal, the home of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), and many defense related organizations. ITSC manages the Global Hydrology Resource Center jointly with the MSFC Earth Science Office, in a collaborative NASA-UAH environment at the National Space Science and Technology Center on the UAH campus

Interesting Projects:

In addition to its work with the GHRC, ITSC is involved with several projects, ITSC is involved with several projects funded by different agencies that are relevant to ESIP efforts and sometimes have evolved out of ESIP-derived collaborations. One example is an ongoing project to develop Data Album technologies, funded by NASA ACCESS, that generate aggregations of data relevant to events such as hurricanes (http://www.itsc.uah.edu/main/projects/data-albums). ITSC is funded by NASA AIST CMAC to develop the Collaborative Work Bench effort that is utilizing cloud resources to provide collaborative access to analysis capabilities for Earth scientists (http://www.itsc.uah.edu/main/projects/collaboration-work-bench).Event-Driven Data Delivery (ED3) is a NASA Applied Science funded activity that is developing an framework supporting the automated delivery of data for disaster and related events (http://www.itsc.uah.edu/main/projects/event-driven-data-delivery-disasters).

Why we participate in ESIP:

ITSC was instrumental in the formation of the ESIP Federation as the information system partner in the collaborative Passive Microwave ESIP, one of the original ESIP projects. Since those early days, the projects and research of ITSC have been consistently aligned with ESIP interests so continued participation has been valuable for the center’s staff, both for collaborations and the generation of ideas and directions. ITSC staff have participated in many of the ESIP committees, clusters and working groups over the years and hopefully have contributed as much as the center has benefited from the associations.